Sunday, June 4, 2017

natural disaster bs


NATURAL DISASTER BS
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note: this book was free when I downloaded, and free last night when I added this note.  A better read than the regular semi-auto porn survivalist stuff out there.  Oh, I could pick it apart all day long.  Saddle bags big enough to hold an AK and a five gallon water jug?  Really?  Gas is bad years after the pandemic, but still plenty of carbine ammo?  Seriously?  But, since it is much better than most, and it was free, I enjoyed it.  Only recommended if still free. Then, if you can live with the logistic concessions needed for the fast pace plot, you might decide his others are well worth the money. First in a series click here
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I do not care for natural disaster preparedness, Sam I Am.  I do not care for twisters or fires, tidal waves or especially attacking braves ( okay, my verse is suffering today, without my green eggs and ham ).  Yes, sure, preparing for natural disasters is a bonus when you get ready for civilization collapse, but what really chaps my ass is when natural disasters become the focus and justification for prepping.  By their very nature, that means you then only prepare short term.  And you see this all the time.  Prepper publications, so afraid of offending any damn buddy, their sphincter clenching at the PC thought crime, or far worse offending an advertiser who controls the purse strings, don’t even try to scare their readers ( when I first started publishing my paper mail ‘zine, I was trying to branch off into microfiche publishing.  There were a lot more used readers for sale cheap twenty years ago.  The people that I was going to pay to print the Army manual on improvised explosives refused to do so, claiming issues from the just then OK City bombing.  Since that time, I go out of my way to offend everyone in one way or another ).

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And I’m not talking about those Fear Porn sites like The Economic Collapse Blog.  They try to make an old granny crossing the street and stubbing her toe on the curb an indicator of the apocalypse.  I’m talking about NOT soft selling the potential problems out there.  Compared to even a ginormous earthquake, a systematic collapse is far more serious.  At least with an earthquake supplies will come in from elsewhere.  But all the pussy preppers are focused on the natural disasters as if they were the ONLY reason to prep.  Like with Glen Beck.  He only wants you to buy freeze dried foods to help out natural disaster victims.  The Yuppie Survival Scum sites think fracking oil is the new energy independence and that Obama or the UN trying to take your semi carbines is the worse that can happen.  Knowing there are less Europeans in the entire NATO contingent than there are minority gang members in L.A., I suppose there needs to be a giant tsunami coming to get you to buy a FLIR scope so the ad revenue doesn’t dry up.  Yes, I know I shouldn’t complain.  If you go to such sites, you know the Kool Aid you are expected to drink.  It still chaps my ass, however. 

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Lots of things chap my ass, or haven’t you noticed?  If nothing else, I rant and rave with the best of them.  Tired of hearing about that?  Tough offal.  If I didn’t hate, you wouldn’t have much to read here.  If you don’t hate, you accept the status quo.  If you don’t hate, you don’t fear.  Embrace the hate.  Just not the hate of an earthquake.  I mean, sure, if you want to move, fine.  Hate away.  I would indeed fear the New Madrid quake as a mean SOB liable to do far more damage than a target rich nuclear attack.  But that is why I don’t live there.  I live in a quake area, but the things will most likely stay minor.  We have flash floods, but that is nothing compared to the East and their excess rainfall flooding things.  It isn’t a hurricane.  Mostly I live where I do to avoid excess people, but an added bonus is the mild natural disasters.  But while living in Florida, I didn’t prep for hurricanes.  I did for Y2K, which was far more scary. 

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You shouldn’t move from California because The Big One will wipe out millions of people ( after the water infrastructure is ruined, let alone the roads ).  You should leave because a communist government will take all your earnings while disarming you and refusing you permission to arm or defend yourself, AND the place is butt hole to elbow neck deep in people.  And, just coincidentally, a big earthquake might kill them all.  Just the crowds and government should prompt you to exit quicker than is decent.  Which is what the Yuppie Scum guru’s tell you also, because it is good advice.  But that is their sole argument whether they include the quake or not.  My argument is that even if a quake never happens, the crowds will kill you.  And you can’t arm yourself, nor can you prepare adequately because of the taxation.  And the crowd will kill you because the energy crisis will make a desert full of millions without food or water a death trap.  If you JUST stopped at natural disasters or bad government, you’d think you could easily prep for that.  A few months of canned goods and big water tank, plus extra FLIR scopes ( FLIR scopes can be thought of as the holy grail of Yuppie Prepping, so they must be able to solve any problem ) and AR magazines.  But if you knew the system was almost at the Waterfall Collapse tip over point, you wouldn’t stay in Cali, would you?

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Focusing on natural disaster soft sells danger.  Not enough to get you to put off buying that scope, but enough to keep you in the rat race as a cubicle warrior.  In its own way, you have to admire the skill it took to achieve that balance.  Enough fear to consume expensive prepper items but not enough to give up your mega-urban corridor job.  If you were smart and believed in systematic collapse you’d take a huge pay cut, cut up all the credit cards and move to a small town.  Which a lot of you, my loyal minions, are.  But I wonder how many who read of the Tri-States are.  Natural disaster preparednous is a disservice to preppers everywhere, who are now living with a false sense of security.  Oh, I don’t believe the guru’s are stupid or evil.  But I do believe they believe their own bullspit.  No where near as bad, except for the end result.  Earthquakes, bite my dingus.

END

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19 comments:

  1. Absolutely agree on everything.

    There is nothing wrong in prepping for hurricanes, especially if you're living in Tornado Alley, but people are not into survivalism because of these Wise Daddy considerations.

    We're here because of the economic and societal collapse. Hurricanes and their consequences are pretty random, collapse is not. It is as if because you're better fed, it makes you automatically into a target.

    The mechanics of a societal and economic collapse are NOT well documented AT ALL, at least in what is available to the public. This is why survivalism is a lot about speculation.

    If you only want to prepare against tornadoes, shelter builders can offer you several options, there are testimonies, official recommendations etc. Very vanilla.

    The collapse is all about people trying to harm you, not wind or water. It's not even about the food or the gear you have or don't have. It's about people being desperate and doing a lot of completely random and extreme things out of despair.

    The real answer to the problem is to know people, to have friends and a functional family. Everything in modern society is geared towards the exact opposite : people don't have functional families (you say stay-at-home Millenials, I say Divorce & Alimony Industry), they don't know people around them (and when they do, it turns out many are dicks and/or morons), and friends are few and far between.

    Most people alive today in our environment grew up that way. Since the collapse will be a period of widespread panic and treachery, this will not be the best of time to make new friends. You might think that if people keep rational it will work out, but if you look at places full of rational people, such as engineers, you'll notice that things can get quickly out of hand there as well.

    You shouldn't have grown up in the First World in this period of time, that's the real issue. Don't bother about the FLIR because your wife will steal it when you sleep to provide for potatoe flakes. Don't bother for an additonal AR-15 because your neighbour will shoot himself in the foot will it and it will jam because nobody cleans it thoroughly enough(they all pretend to, though...)

    The Zero-Skill Approach is not magic, it only gets you a few steps further before the moment when the "test of battle defeats any prior plans" (or something like that, as said by Sun Tzu Mike Tyson)

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    1. I wish you were up on writing more-you have a great way with describing our blind spots. I'll stay happy with your wonderful comments, however.

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    2. My ego is very pleased by your nice reply :)

      The thing is, I am more interesting when I react to something written by somebody else. This is why I am happy to comment on other people's blogs than to make a blog of my own. The two blogs I visit are yours and Texas Arcane's vault-co.blogspot.com

      The survivalist forums I used to know have been destroyed by trolls or morons.
      For instance the forum aussurvivalist was a heavenly place twelve years ago, since then redneck wanabees (imagine that) have run the place to the ground.
      The forum neardeathexperiments (US) was becoming unliveable for me when it became politicized, by the Tea Party and its many mutations/derivatives. It wasn't as much a plan as the consequence of greedy people wanting to expand their political base whatever the cost.

      In a blog, all exchanges take place through a single administrator, in the end it makes for a much better place.

      In theory a forum is a much better exchange platform, but then the messages grow exponentially and the admins end up overburdened and demotivated, when not infiltrated by the subversive/intrusive force.

      A blog is much more difficult if you want to retrieve information, but in the end it still works, whereas the "better" solution proves unworkable.

      There is a lesson here about systems. Often, a less advanced system keeps on functioning because it is rugged and keeps working, whereas the more technological system proves too ressource-intensive or too ambitious to keep operating.

      In the end civilisations collapse and people fall back to a tribal or clanic system, like in Somalia, just because it works.

      Also, and to finish the parallel with the two, look at all the time we spend on a forum policing trolls and stupid people. In a complex society, we also spend too much ressources on policing scammers, SJWs, Welfare Queens, State monopolies, the Military-Industrial Complex etc.

      In a tribal / clanic / more rugged structure there is much less friction and you get more out of your input than in a complex society.

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    3. I like your analogy. Yes, a blog publisher acts like an agent or editor rather than a cork board. You can claim bias, and it's true, but as usual less is more and less unfiltered comments the better. I don't think I delete one non-spam message a year. Just knowing I approve messages keeps everyone on subject and civil.

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    4. I LOL'd at the mention of Aussurvive. I used to frequent that site years ago. When I got my scare & realised I was "playing" prepper I revisited all the ole faithfulls (Aussurvive, Bison, Vault-co) I haven't rejoined oz survive, it no longer has any value.

      All the other sites are yuppie militia BS that has no value to me. I don't have the $ for FLIR, not allowed to buy semi-auto's, In fact I don't have $ for much beyond the basics (yeah, I know I'm exagerating somewhat as I still buy beer on the weekend / drive a car & paying a mortgage)

      Thanks Lord Bison for sticking to your guns & keeping it real

      Thanks Ave for the input you have here as well. I really dig your replies & I'm taking the no-skill / Bison Hybrid path

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    5. As they say, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Militia prepping/pussy preppers/play prepping used to be fun until the real economic collapse started ( no one thought it was real in 2008-just another recession. The oil running out, now it starts getting real ).

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    6. @ Dingo
      >> " Thanks Ave for the input you have here as well. I really dig your replies & I'm taking the no-skill / Bison Hybrid path"

      Now my ego is inflated and throbbing. You wouldn't want to see that ;)

      Thanks for the kind words :)

      Yes, it's been a while since those pre-Katrina days. Actually, when I joined Aussurv in 2004, the locals mentionned an ever better time before the Y2K hysteria, with solid advice, legendary contributors and solid research being made.

      Survivalism was always a business, but I wonder when it became an escapist ideology. Perhaps the nature of survivalism changed with the internet.

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    7. If it was pre-Y2k, I would imagine at that time it was computer nerds only ( the Net was still pay-per-hour for the masses then ), so more of a close net community. So, perhaps, Netscape killed survivalism?

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  2. @James
    >> "So, perhaps, Netscape killed survivalism?"

    I wanted to make a joke about Shakers killing survivalism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers ) but then it ocured to me that Luddites etc. were also a form of surviving the industrial revolution.

    I don't know if you already made posts about the history of survivalism. As far as I know, Kurt Saxon was the father of survivalism as we know it, but in the meantime there must have been remnants of the Great Depression generation still around. What became of their knowledge ?

    The Sixties were all about Baby Boomers feeling like they were much less than their parents' generation, who went through the Great Depression & WW2 but also who over-pampered the Baby Boomer's Generation. So perhaps Kurt Saxon, with his very shady background (Scientology, Satanism, Nazism), was all about nurturing that generation into that we now call Yuppie Survivalism.

    This is a genuine question, I know too little about that aspect.

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    1. Yuppie survivalism was born in, what, 1949? As soon as the Soviets got the atomic bomb and the rich could build their own backyard shelters. Just a continuation of the rich classes snubbing the poor. The only difference was that in the 50's and 60's, the middle class had a chance of joining the rich in survival due to our one time "shared economy". The '70's then saw the rich regaining ground against the poor, a class structure solidly back in place after a twenty-five year hiatus. Once again, only the rich deserved to live. I see Kurt as a backlash against rich survivalists, the only one. He wasn't the father of survivalism, at most the originator of the term. Survivalism was around since nuclear war. In name, they were born of the '70's economic collapse when it wasn't just nukes you had to worry about. Heinlein the SF writer was rather outspoken about surviving nuclear war, but I don't have a timeline of that in comparison to Kurt. I can't say with any authority who popularized the '70's systematic collapse survivalist movement ( prior to that, it was survive until rescued ), just saying survivalists under another name was a thing prior to the 1970's. I'll need to do some research into Howard Ruff and Clayton and other names, see if I can't sniff out a few more details. I came onto the scene in 1979 so I might be misremembering '80's events for '70's, since it was so long ago.

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    2. Very interesting, Jim. I think the "systematic collapse" scenarios appeared with Dennis Meadows' "Limit to Growth" study, that was a real shocker back then. It also coincided with the First Oil Shock.

      Looking back at that period in time, the First Oil Shock in 1973 was only a trick to create Petrodollars and thus give some credence to was since 1971 paper money, the US dollar.

      The 70's crisis was perhaps also TPTB reneging on the promised cornucopia they marketed to the US population since WW2. The whole 50's & 60's was basically a ploy to make the bad memories of the Great Depression go away. Actually, Wall Street only entered into exuberance in the mid-80's when the last decisionmakers who had known the Great Depression retired.

      The whole theme of the 70's was about how the Man was about to get rid of the Proles.

      Actual experimentation had been underway way before that with the Pruitt-Igoe project (late 50's), Calhoun's Mouse Utopias in the 50's -60's (also a mainstay of 70's culture) and that whole LSD research thing.

      So perhaps this is the moment where people started to worry less about the A-Bomb and more about what TPTB were turning their environment into.

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    3. To continue my last comment. Don Stephens popularized "retreater" in the '60's. He wrote for "inflation survival letter" then. Browne did seminars on surviving monetary collapse in 1967. Kurt did publish on surviving US famine first, in 73, one year ahead of Ruff. His newsletter Survivor wasn't until 75. He wrote more about weird religious stuff prior to that than survivalism ( the famine book his only effort prior to the newsletter ). I think the "father of survivalism" title should go to Browne and Stephens, five years ahead of Kurt. Even the "Limits" study was '72, so while that was probably what sparked the two Famine books-Ruff and Kurt-you can't really call that the founding of the survivalist movement, not with "retreater" coming about five years previous. How about we call Kurt the "father", and Stephens/Browne the "grandfathers" of systematic collapse survivalism, with "Limits" the first bible.

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    4. Damn, you just know I'm going to have to write an article on this.

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  3. >>Damn, you just know I'm going to have to write an article on this.

    Actually you could do a series of articles that would crowd source ideas, inspiration and research for what would amount to a small book about the subject. It would definitely find buyers, especially when survivalism goes more mainstream.

    Besides, you're probably bored by now, not having to confront the evil manager & the dread chores all day long :) :)

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    1. I think I'll be lucky to get a long idea out of it.

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  4. Natural Disasters are a great wedge to bring around those who might be persuaded, and help those who won't be persuaded to prep for, the full on PODA.
    Everywhere has some sort of Natural and Manmade threats out there.
    Preparing for them makes great cover for PODA preps, and since you WILL see some sort of one of the Natural or Manmade threats in your neighborhood eventually it is a great thing to have preps for that occurrence bothe before the final reverberation of the crash and afterward.
    And as that is a good back-up cover for your prepping, you can claim to be out of preps because your only prepared for XYZ prior to the crash when people come knocking. "I'm sorry I had enough for 3 weeks of hurricane damage to the power lines, not enough for 4 months of power outage from the power company going bankrupt and getting nationalized."
    So I don't dismiss the disaster prepping as a good first step.
    Of course it shouldn't be the LAST step - there is a whole lifetime of other disasters, civilization crash, anarchy, and PODA, to prepare for after that first disaster.
    Its not a vocation or hobby, it is a lifestyle. Just like the one our pioneer ancestors lived everyday.

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    1. Okay, I see your point, but I submit to you if you teach them disaster only, they stay there. You teach them PODA, they use disasters as a cover story. Which, I love that idea BTW.

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    2. Welcome to that concept.
      But disasters happen. No one argues about tornadoes or blizzards or heatwaves or blackouts or unemployment interrupting their lives as usual. So to give your area/community the best chance of pulling through as possible by having them prep for disasters they KNOW will hit the area eventually. Then you slowly ramp it up to include disasterous inflation, great depression, increased energy costs, civil disorders, etc. And that way slowly steer those who can to start peeking at the PODA and eventually even start them preparing for it.
      First steps, a wedge into the business as usual belief structure that slowly but surely can be used to bash vast gaping cracks into their previous view of the world. Cracks that can be filled with frugal preps and mindsets.

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    3. But in reality, do you see that actually working? Most people are close minded. They take, maybe, one baby step, congratulate themselves, then never change again out of fear of confronting taking issues to their logical conclusion.

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